Wednesday, May 23, 2012

How does affiliate marketing work?

Affiliate Marketing is a popular method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying finder's-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay-per-click), registrant (Pay-per-lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay-per-Sale).
The most attractive aspect of affiliate marketing, from the merchant's viewpoint, is that no payment is due to an affiliate until results are realized.
Some e-commerce sites, such as Amazon.com run their own affiliate programs while other e-commerce vendors use third party services provided by intermediaries like CommissionJunction.com, and LinkShare.com to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates. Some businesses owe much of their growth and success to this marketing technique.
Merchants who are considering adding an affiliate strategy to their online sales channel should research the different technological solutions available to them. Some types of affiliate management solutions include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.
In its early days many internet users held negative opinions of affiliate marketing due to the tendency of affiliates to use spam to promote the programs in which they were enrolled. As affiliate marketing has matured many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming.
Currently there is much debate around the affiliate practice of Spamdexing and many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of autogenerated webpages each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of SEOing their sites with the search engines. This is sometimes referred to as spamming the search engine results.
Other contributors answers:

  • There are 10,000's of companies on the Internet that are willing to pay a performance-based commission if you can drive sales to their websites by promoting their products and services. To do this you join the "affiliate programs" run by these companies.


Your job as an "affiliate" is to be the middleman between online consumers and merchant' products. By aligning consumers with the products they are looking for, you get a commission for every sale from the merchant through an Affiliate Program.

Affiliate Marketing is a great opportunity to earn money online as well as have the freedom of owning your own business and working at home with next to nothing in start up costs but it takes hard work and it is not a get rich quick scheme.
You find people who are interested in a certain type of product or service in a certain type of market online. Then you recommend different products to them. If they should buy those products based on your recommendation, the merchant who is selling those products will give you a cut of the sale. You need two things - an affiliate (review) website, and an affiliate link (that's what you're going to be using to drive traffic to people's programs).

That's the basic concept of how affiliate marketing works.

  • Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.


Affiliate marketing used to be a cottage industry that has grown fast in the last couple years.
In the mid-90's Amazon.com pioneered the idea by enabling Web site owners to link to their books and earn a commission if someone clicks over from their Web site to Amazon and buys the book. The original idea on the "above-the-ground Internet" was introduced by CDNow in 1994, two years before the Amazon Associate Program was launched. Adult websites used affiliate marketing methods to promote their businesses even before CDNow.
Now almost every large e-commerce site has some sort of affiliate program. Offering commissions and incentives for other Web site owners to promote your product or service is a fast and inexpensive way to grow an online business.

  • Affiliate receive commissions for every customer they refer to a merchant who makes a purchase. Usually affiliate marketing is conducted via a venue such as a niche website, where you focus your attention to a certain part of the population, a niche, this could be anything from golf to acne medicine to weight loss.


If you are looking for a great work at home career, you can become an Affiliate, Internet Marketer.

Affiliate Internet marketers are people who promote and market other business on the internet. When a sale is made, a commission is paid to the affiliate marketer.

Depending on the company, commissions can range from 10%-60%. The marketers that do well, make very comfortable incomes and have are very successful with their work at home career.

You as an Affiliate Marketer promote the other business by writing articles for blogs, making simple websites that provide consumers information, and even making referral videos and posting them on Youtube!

Affiliate marketing, in my opinion, is the ultimate work at home career as it is not a system, or cheesy Multilevel Marketing scheme.

Almost any business that sells goods and services offers some sort of referral/affiliate system. If you look at the bottom of most websites, you will see a link for "webmasters" or "affiliates", click this link and the company will provide you with a special link that is specific to you. When a consumer clicks on your link and is taken to the companies website and buys from that company, your link is tracked and the commission for the sale goes to you. Check out Amazon.com's program it's one of the largest. There are 1000's more though!

Promoting business is relatively easy, although there are better ways to do it that yield better results for you.

There are a websites that instructs people how to build a work at home career, although sadly, a good number of them are scams.
I hope this helps you find and build a successful work at home career!

  • Affiliate Marketing is an online activity that allows any individual to promote a merchant's product to receive a commission on the sale the product. The individual joins a merchant or small business owner's affiliate program for free and receives a special hyperlink with the affiliate's ID.


The affiliate will proceed to advertise the product in a number of ways, mostly online, by writing articles about the product, creating a blog around the topic or "niche" related to the product, posting a classified ad, or pay to advertise the product.
Affiliate IDs can be quite lengthy and hard for customers to remember. Often times an affiliate will promote a product with banners or "anchor" text. Banners were once very popular in the past, but their overuse drove customers to ignore them. They are used less often today. Text links with "anchor" text are more popular and blend nicely into written content such as articles or blog posts.
For example:
Joe's affiliate link promoting a weightloss ebook is: http://weightlossebook.joe123.com.
This would clearly stand out in an article. Instead, Joe writes:
Did you know you can lose weight in just 30 days?
Joe highlights the word "weight", clicks on the hyperlink icon (or types in HTML code), then types in the URL space: http://weightlossebook.joe123.com.
The word "weight" will be highlighted. A reader can click on that word to be led directly to the ebook sales page. If the person likes what he reads and decides to buy, Joe will receive a commission for selling that ebook.
If Joe is able to get several people to buy through his affiliate link, then he can earn hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. This is one of the main reasons why affiliate marketing is gaining popularity. It's low overhead costs and ability to maximize profits make it a very lucrative home business.
You can make money with affiliate marketing. You have to know the rules of the game, so to speak. You have to pick a product that is already doing well. You can go to clickbank.com and cj.com to find products that are popular. You can either write your product better or just become an affiliate of that product.

Take a look at the website and see if the sales page is any good. Create a squeeze page or a landing page to send prospects and not let them go directly to the sales page.

Post on forums, create your own blog and make comments on other people's blog. make sure you have a signature link that people can click on for more information in the forums.

There are some more specifics to this, but it can happen to you as it will happen to others. Article marketing is a key component of affiliate marketing success and affiliate earning potential.


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